When you re-read the article, I hope you'll see that I didn't agree with their approach. That's the point of this thread, their approach didn't work. Their tactics and techniques probably have little or no place in US Law Enforcement Training.

The promise of ISS was that they were going to "re-evaluate" their approach and try again to find a way to integrate some of their stuff into training for US LE. One idea that they were kicking around was running a hard-core "Officer Survival" school.

To answer you questions specifically, yes, they were trying to teach in a stress-filled environment. Of course, I must've absorbed something, since I wrote an article about it, but it was not the best "learning environment." What we learned of the techniques was developed through repetition and it seemed to work to a certain extent: students were able to complete drills using the recommended techniques, most of which were foreign to them. Do I think that means we should all adopt this "teaching" technique? No.

Quite simply, there was nothing new that was taught at the school that I thought would be a "better way to approach tactical problems."
Where they over the top? Absolutley, particularly for the time frame and mixture of students that they had to work with. But they did remind (or suggest to) a lot of people that stressful training is a lot different than what we normally do. I know that at least one student took one of the aggressive training drills back to his team ( I saw him integrate it into his team's AT). I'd guess that others did as well. That was the real benefit to the course: Hopefully, people took some of that aggressiveness, toned it down and worked it into their training at home. If you took away the top 10% of the "all-out" nature of the 2 days, you probably could've eliminated 50%+ of the injuries and distractions and you still would've been much more demanding than the average LE "stress course" or "practical excercise."